Memento Mori
by KeplersDream
Summary: The feisty Rose Tyler failed to appear; instead, the broken young woman mumbled something about her mother, Jackie, griping about how her clock was tickin' and when she and the Doctor were gonna get it together. I rolled my eyes. Was that truly what she wanted?
Author's notes: Although this isn't part of the "Mirror and the Other," you could read it as John O'Reilly's point-of-view, if you're familiar with the MATO, or someone else's. I've also tried to keep it gender-neutral. This is NOT going to be Doctor friendly. With all of the endless fawning over the Doctor, I'll gladly be the minority voice; the Doctor's not, in my opinion, a very likeable character, especially in "Journey's End." I always thought it would be interesting to have characters that did not like him and weren't afraid to criticize him.

Memento Mori

Since the end of the Darkness, business at Torchwood's been mundane, to put it mildly. Funny enough, I miss the years-long rush of adrenalin and mass hysteria that categorized the world as we know it. Guns, guts, glory. Now, it's curry, beer and sport. Harriet Jones gave yet another boring speech praising our great triumph and then gave an even more useless Question Time earlier in the day. While President Jones, as a matter of course, took the credit for a job well done for humanity, Torchwood's been cleaning up the post-apocalyptic mess that the Daleks and other aliens left in parting. The Physics and Engineering team has been working twelve-hour shifts to steadily power down the device that ended up being useless to save the multiverse. In the end, it had been the Doctor. Though Physics and Mathematics were never my strong suit, Director Tyler has assigned me to PE, along with Rose Tyler and the Doctor.

"The Doctor."

Everyone attributes our victory to the Time Lord. Depending on whom you ask, the Doctor's either the Messiah, Son of Man, angel, daemon or a magician. I would have believed that, too, had it not been for the far-off, dull look in Agent Tyler's eyes. Every Torchwood employee was familiar with the tragic story of Pete Tyler's parallel daughter. When she was nineteen, she ran away with a lonely alien in a blue box who took her to every imaginable place in her Universe. Then he changed his face so that he could live again to travel with her in his blue box. He took her with him, during which they fought with us in this universe against Lumic's Cybermen and won. They continued, only for the Stuff of Legends to be separated at Canary Wharf. Rose ended up here and never gave up on finding her Doctor.

That's what everyone thinks, but I know better. They want to think that Rose was a poor damsel-in-distress, waiting for her pretty prince to rescue her. It's easier — after all, she's just a woman from a council estate. She should just make the best of it and tie herself to a man. They didn't see the Rose that cracked open her _Fundamentals of Physics_ textbook and started from the very beginning to learn the science that she had failed while daydreaming in high school. That Rose became the one who inattentively let her hair fade to a dirty-blonde to focus on the upcoming EU Mathematics Olympiad. (She placed second for Great Britain.) She traded jean skirts and print shirts for black trousers, blue leather jackets, Converses and black-rimmed glasses. Agent Rose Tyler worked her way up the ranks of Torchwood, earning the respect of every agent there, eventually leading her first away-team at a mere two years later.

Rose Tyler was our man in the field.

Man. Singular. Initially, I thought that she and Mickey were dating, but they hadn't been together for many years. One night after a few drinks, we went home together. Rather, we went to my place. Early in the wee hours, she confessed to me under booze and darkness that she once knew a man who saved this planet many times over and how she would return to his side. I didn't say anything — there was no need. I knew that she was referring to the Great Disappearing Doctor. At first, I felt a sliver of jealousy wrap around my heart and a self-deprecating weight slam on my chest; of course, a beautiful, wealthy, unique woman like Rose would be in love with an alien in a magical box. Days later, when she and I were attempting in vain to avoid each other, I wondered how much of that was actually true. A week later, I mustered up the courage to ask her if he was working on a plan to return her to the other universe. Rose muttered that it was complicated.

Shortly thereafter, we all heard at Torchwood that she received top marks in Physics at UCL for the year. Rumour had it that she was offered places at Cambridge and Harvard.

I expressed my congratulations.

Then the stars went out and we all know the rest.

It did honestly surprise me when she returned with the Doctor — or at least, someone called the Doctor. I never believed that the high and mighty Time Lord — that's what Agent Simmonds calls him — would lower himself to staying with a human girl for the rest of his life. An alien with all of time and space at his fingertips who, according to Mickey, ran away from his mind-numbing planet wouldn't stop for Rose Tyler. When asked about the Doctor (and everyone wanted to know), Mickey rolled his eyes and grumbled, "He hated domestics. Always complainin' 'bout Rose and me, he was."

It didn't surprise me that Mickey left for the other universe. Who in his or her right mind would want to compete with the Doctor?

Frankly, the Doctor always sounded to me like a pompous asshole. On his first day, I wasn't disappointed in my assessment of him. Instead of working with everyone, he barked out orders how to dismantle the time drive, how not to dismantle the time drive, how to store biohazardous materials, how not to store radioactive waste. You know, we're not complete morons at Torchwood; thanks to Adam Mitchell and that bitch Yvonne Hartman, we saw first-hand what stupid and reckless got you in this business.

However, it really chapped my ass when he yelled at her in that annoying Jamie Oliver-dachshund cross of a voice, "Bloody stupid Torchwood! You apes should know better than to polarize a temporal inhibitor with a magnetron…"

I neither heard, nor understood the rest. There was no need. Rose helped design the Dimension Cannon, so it was like a shard of glass jammed and twisted into an already fragile heart. I knew that she thought he'd let her stay if she found him and proved that she was smart. But I saw how, when he wasn't barking orders, he loved to show off his vast knowledge to the young Torchwood secretaries and agents who believed he was the Almighty.

With each day post-Norway, the determined spark in Rose Tyler's eyes withered more and more.

Was it because he was or wasn't the Doctor?

About six weeks after their return to London, I learned that this Doctor was a Time Lord-human hybrid clone who single-handedly destroyed the Daleks, much to the original Doctor's horror. I'll give him that one; there's no one on Earth (and I'd imagine other planets, as well) that wouldn't have thrown the switch on those things. But save a billion Daleks and let billions more throughout the universes suffer?

I guess it's too bad that we're not Daleks, Doctor. They always seemed to have second chances.

I was reading _The Time Machine_ when Rose knocked on my flat door. I invited her in my sparse sitting room and offered her a beer. The twinkle was nearly gone by the time she told me what had occurred on the beach in Norway. I remained silent; I didn't need to tell her what she didn't already know. Instead, I asked her about her studies. Though she had resumed them, she was merely in it to graduate. She murmured painfully that it didn't have the same interest as it once had.

At this point, I was angry, I'll admit. In moments of true anger, rarely do you remember what actually occurred, only what you did and what you were thinking. I shouted that it was a disgrace; she had come all this way, spent all this time learning the science and the calculations, only to quit when the Doctor finally showed his face. The feisty Rose Tyler failed to appear; instead, the broken young woman mumbled something about her mother, Jackie, griping about how her clock was tickin' and when she and the Doctor were gonna get it together. I rolled my eyes. Was that truly what she wanted?

Suddenly, Rose broke down, melting into five years' worth of repressed resentment and anger. How dare he treat her this way? How dare they make a life-altering decision without her and in front of her. Like she was some stupid ape incapable of sentience. She hadn't felt that horribly since the first time on the beach in Norway and a close third in 20.4, when a bloke named Jimmy Stone slapped her in front of his friends and called her a fat cow. The formerly cold, grey eyes sparked with amber for the first time in six weeks, as if she had an epiphany.

"How many times," she asked, "did he run off and leave me behind without any intention of returning? How many times did he dismiss my ideas, praise me for brilliance, only to dismiss me again? And yet, during those six weeks, did he ever ask me about my life in this world?"

It turned out that he did once, only to interrogate her about the Dimension Cannon.

Taking a sip of my beer, I inquired as to who really saved the world. Rose smiled and whispered a woman's name in my ear, one that everyone in both universes would know and honour, and playfully slapped my shoulder when I smirked. Maybe one day I'll meet her and thank her for her service.

Then she frowned. Would the Doctor abandon her, too? Even the Most Important Woman in the Universe? Surely, she was better than Rose.

Inhaling deeply, I peered at the blonde beside me and I kept silent, not having the heart to verbalize what I truly thought. The Doctor runs away, even from his companions. He leaves the ex-wife behind for the prettier mistress. But from the mahogany turmoil in her eyes, I could tell that Rose agreed with me.

Out of the blue, I felt the need at that moment to ask her what I had been dying to since that night in darkness.

 _What do you want, Rose Tyler?_

She said nothing for several minutes, only blinking at an imaginary film of her life. Her voice seemed to echo in the silence when she finally replied, "The same that everyone wants — the freedom to be myself. The freedom to choose."

I held up my beer bottle in cheers; she grinned brightly.

RTRTRT

Though I had seen plenty of Rose Tyler since her impromptu visit to my flat, it wasn't for another several days that I encountered the Doctor. He was, as usual, chewing out some poor 25-year-old intern about safety and temporal flux. I watched passively as Rose entered the laboratory and nodded perfunctorily at him. As he prattled on about some machine that he had built at the Time Lord Academy, Rose pretended to listen as she flashed a quick grin in my direction that caused my heart to palpitate. However, she miscalculated ever so slightly because the Doctor observed the silent interaction between us. He uncharacteristically quietened, shifting his dark brown eyes from her to me and back. Though he tried to hide it, I saw him gulp down shock, jealousy and rejection. In spite of the monumental satisfaction I felt on Rose's behalf, I didn't know whether to laugh in his face or put a hand over his shoulder in sympathy.

Here was the King who would be Man, never having seen his companion for the goddess-woman that she always was. He saw her as the same 21-year-old shop girl from Peckham that he had left in an alternate universe.

Not The Woman Who Walked Worlds, the Woman Who Made the Doctor Better. The Doctor's Doctor. The Doctor Who Left the Doctor Behind.

I realized then what the answer to my question was. It was because he was the Doctor in every way it mattered. He was a Time Lord. Time was static, a fixed master timeline. They did not like change.

But Time had passed for her. She was no longer interested in EastEnders, marriage, babies or even Torchwood. She wanted to be on the first spaceship to Mars and Jupiter. Life was too fantastic to be stuck on a rock with some bloke and a mortgage.

I snickered as she surreptitiously pocketed a vortex manipulator.


End file.
